Sound Transit stars align--with ORCA info no less!

RantWoman is terribly excited. First her day started with a direct phone call from a humble public servant at Sound Transit. RantWoman is not sure she put her phone number on the electronic comment form, but considering RantWoman's contacts in the transit world, RantWoman really does not care how the humble public servant got her phone number.

Later in the day, RantWoman got email replies to several questions sent via the ORCA comments page. Most thrilling of all, the phone call from the humble public servant at Sound Transit gave information that basically lined up with the information received later in the day in response to RantWoman's numerous ORCA questions.

The highlights of RantWoman's learnings:

(Note: RantWoman supposes all of this is subject to change as ORCA kinks get ironed out, as budget cuts or systemwide fare adjustments occur, as sunspots come and go... RantWoman can be predicted to have opinions about some of the possible adjustments, but RantWoman will have them in a separate rant. For now, RantWoman is just delighted about the info now coursing through her fingers.)

1. People who have regional reduced fare permits, that is senior citizens or people who have marched their disability through the official paperwork and have paid their $9 / month do not even have to tap the ORCA readers to ride Link Light Rail. The ORCA email referred to "systems issues." The humble public servant from Sound Transit mentioned that this may change as early as January. Lots of other things may happen between now and January too. RantWoman recommends monitoring what various political candidates and public appointees are proposing regarding transit budget gaps and related issues. However, in the meantime, if you have a reduced fare permit, colloquially a disabled pass, do not bother tapping the ORCA machine because it will just extract money disabled permit users do not have to be spending from their ORCA wallets. Note, you DO need to have your ORCA card with you and may expect sometimes to be asked to show it as proof of payment.

"Proof of payment" means there is nothing collecting fares as you get on or off the transit mode of your choice. Instead, you can be asked at any time to show proof that you have paid the required fare. "Proof of payment" is actually not RantWoman's favorite way to ride transit. It saves LOTS of time boarding and disembarking, but RantWoman has experience with fare inspectors who manage to be even more sour-faced and humor-impaired than, say, those cheerful folks inspecting your footwear at the airport.

RantWoman remembers a ride once on Munich's equivalent of Light Rail. RantWoman had just bought herself a lovely all-day pass and gotten onto a train. On strode a fair inspector who barked something at RantWoman. RantWoman's German, to the extent that it exists at all runs heavily to Bach motet texts and other pieces of liturgy; it is woefully deficient in phrases like "where is the bathroom?" and "Tickets Please." When RantWoman did not immediately produce the requested ticket, the fare inspector barked at her not to go anywhere and just for emphasis added "50-mark fine" in English. Luckily for RantWoman's travel budget she figured out from what she could see of her fellow passengers that people were offering various forms of tickets and the one she had had in her pocket the whole time worked splendidly. RantWoman does not wish this sort of greeting on visitors to her city.

2. If you manage to poke your way through the directions on SoundTransit's site describing various categories of fares, you will see a face value that has to be added to your card in one table, either in multiples of single rides, or from a separate table in the costs added to a basic reduced fare permit card for a monthly pass, if say you travel a lot in fare zones that demand more than what is covered by the Regional Reduced Fare Permit.

RantWoman here wishes to reiterate her enthusiasm for passes: they save the hassle of toting around quarters and worrying about how long one's transfer is good for, not to mention interacting with vending machines or customer service staff. RantWoman is even quite annoying among some of her bus-riding peers about her enthusiasm for passes.

The problem though for ORCA users is that people with the regional reduced fare permit have to think about getting their expanded zone passes a completely different way than they may be used to. Instead of thinking in terms of the face value of a pass needed and a discount when buying a pass, now a Regional Reduced Fare permit rider gets to think in terms of the fare he or she has to pay and then adds a pass for that face value. The ORCA system includes options for adding passes at the required discount levels. RantWoman will be curious to know how many disabled permit users actually use them.

RantWoman knows someone she will exhort to test this next month. RantWoman also acknowledges that the number of disabled people in this position may be quite small compared to all users of disabled passes. However RantWoman herself is happy to know this for purposes of figuring out reasonable amounts of money to leave in her ORCA wallet for her occasional wide-ranging expeditions.

RantWoman had a third sort of gnarly question about ORCA; she got back a reply and even accidentally bumped across topical vocabulary while looking up something else, but that subject gets its own rant sometime.

RantWoman will close with one small fantasy. By small, RantWoman means easy to specify but not necessarily easy to deliver. In RantWoman's fantasy life, she would have to fish around among a lot fewer separate pages to figure out the amount she needs to add to her ORCA card for different fare levels. RantWoman envisions some kind of appropriately labelled map showing the fare zones, by agency if necessary and the values of the fares including pass levels needed for different categories of users. In RantWoman's fantasy life, one could either save this query to one's account or step through it every time one added passes to one's ORCA card. Thecontents of some fields would have to be updated at arbitrary intervals every time different agencies adjusted their fares and maybe their fare zones, but for now RantWoman is simply going to assume a table of data able to handle such updates.

Okay, RantWoman knows actually delivering her fantasy query in one path instead of fishing around several web pages might be a programming pain, but RantWoman is going to enjoy her fantasy and let someone else worry about actually implementing it.